Abstract
Charles Taylor is a unique figure in Anglo-American intellectual life. He is so partly because of the breadth and originality of his work, and partly because the projects he undertakes do not fit neatly into any specific container of academic life.
Is he a historian? Not exactly, though there is a lot of history in his work. Does he offer explanations? Well, yes, in a sense, but these “explanations” do not fit into the usual causal matrix. In both Sources of the Self 1 and A Secular Age, 2 for instance, he provides an overview of the intersubjective conditions in which contending beliefs and judgments are formed in late modern life. He does not exactly “explain” how modernity or secularism came into being. But his discussions of the alternative “sources” available for people to draw upon and of how theistic belief has become more “optional” in secular societies do help to set the context of explanation for them. Indeed, when you engage Taylor on the matrix of intersubjectivity your notion of what an explanation looks like is apt to undergo revision.
Is he, then, a normative theorist? Yes, but one of his brilliant early essays also taught us how every explanatory project through the possibilities it delineates, the explananda it advances, and the ways its key concepts combine description and judgment – is at once explanatory and normative. Taylor thus elides the dichotomy between such enterprises.
Is he, perhaps, a metaphysician then? Yes, he is. But he teaches how all social theories and cultural interpretations are laden with metaphysical assumptions, even if and when their proponents deny this feature of them. His work challenges both the possibility of being post-metaphysical and the autonomy of metaphysics. Further, he advances a specific metaphysical perspective while refusing to pretend it has been proven. He acknowledges, even celebrates, the element of faith that resides in his stance without pretending that either he or others can dispense with some such stance. Nontheists, for instance, express elements of faith in their onto-stories too. Taylor thus encourages us to bridge that artificial dichotomy between philosophy and theology that still haunts the academy.
Is he a secularist? Well, yes, in a sense. But it is a secularism that many secularists have tried to avoid. It is a secularism that comes to terms with its own partial dependence upon some theistic traditions; it is also one that shows a variety of theists how they too are linked to a capacious secular tradition that it may be wise to save in some respects.
I count myself in Taylor’s debt in all of these respects. I also agree with him that while an ontology does not determine an ethics or politics, there are complex relays between these three dimensions. A stance on any one of them leans on the others, encouraging some moves in them and discouraging others. That is why Taylor finds it incumbent to move up and down the historical, ontological, faith, ethical, political, and linguistic scales in which any issue or problem is set. As he moves across these scales, his method becomes comparative, all the better to challenge other traditions, and to locate hidden assumptions and tendencies in his own.
Proceeding this way, Taylor identifies sore points not only in the traditions he challenges, but also in those in which he is the most invested by background, faith, and hope. Clearly, he thinks that coming to terms with comparative deficiencies and temptations in contending traditions provides the most promising route to encouraging internal modesty within each and to open promising modes of exchange between them.
I find myself persuaded by Taylor on the themes listed above, even as I have sought to contest some of the ontological assumptions and political priorities he pursues. He invests me with ambitions I am certain to fall short in meeting: to become an engaged intellectual open to new modes of exploration. I remain particularly indebted to his idea that an ethic can involve the cultivation of opaque sources already circulating within and around you rather than its derivation from undeniable assumptions, though I seek to open up the tradition of immanence he sometimes squeezes hard until it, too, becomes a carrier of such an ethic. In fact, over the last 40 years I have found myself deeply inspired by his work: determined to track its movements back and forth between the ontological, ethical, and political, eager to contest some of his specific findings, and hopeful that I am doing so in a way that lives up to his appreciation of the conjectural element in cultural thought and the modes of responsive generosity folded into his specific accounts.
Even though I had previously been engaged with his thought, I was lucky to spend a year with him in 1977 when I became a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College in Oxford and he was starting his tenure there as the Chichele Professor. The study group, which he, Steven Lukes, Sheldon Wolin, Alan Montefiore, Ronald Beiner, Michael Sandel, and I formed, sticks with me as a shining point in my intellectual life – I very much prize the intellectual exchanges and collegial contacts we have maintained since then about pluralism, genealogy, ethics, immanence, Foucault, and other topics yet. Happy 85th birthday, Chuck. Thanks for providing such an admirable model of engaged intellectual life.